Here are some of the best questions for a patient survey about insurance coverage experience, plus practical tips to craft your own. We’ve also included advice for building excellent surveys with Specific—our platform lets you generate a complete insurance coverage survey for patients in seconds.
Best open-ended questions for patient survey about insurance coverage experience
Open-ended questions let people share honest thoughts, stories, and frustrations you wouldn’t capture with checkboxes. They work best when you want rich context—great for understanding why something matters or what’s missing in care. And in the realm of insurance, where the challenges are rarely simple, these deeper replies can reveal the most actionable insights. Considering over 70% of U.S. adults feel the health care system doesn’t meet their needs due to high costs and complexity, it’s crucial to dig into personal experiences in their own words. [1]
How would you describe your overall experience with your current health insurance provider?
Can you tell us about a recent situation where your insurance coverage helped—or limited—your access to care?
What aspects of your insurance coverage do you find most confusing or difficult to understand?
Have you encountered any delays or denials when seeking care? If so, what happened?
In your experience, how easy or hard is it to get information or support from your insurer?
What impact, if any, has the cost of coverage or out-of-pocket expenses had on your decision to seek care?
Could you share an example of how your insurance coverage has affected your ability to get medications you need?
What would you change about your insurance coverage to better support your health and well-being?
If you’ve faced challenges with claim approvals, can you describe what the process was like for you?
How do you feel about the level of transparency your insurer provides about costs and coverage details?
Best single-select multiple-choice questions for patient survey about insurance coverage experience
Single-select multiple-choice questions are ideal when you want to quantify key issues, track trends, or set the stage for deeper discussion. They’re a friendly way to get patients talking, too—sometimes it feels easier to pick an answer than to come up with a story right away. These work especially well for spotting satisfaction trends, identifying common pain points, and guiding your follow-ups.
Question: How satisfied are you with your current insurance coverage?
Very satisfied
Somewhat satisfied
Neutral
Somewhat dissatisfied
Very dissatisfied
Question: Which of these areas has been most challenging with your insurance this year?
Understanding what’s covered
Cost of premiums or out-of-pocket expenses
Getting claims approved
Access to preferred healthcare providers
Other
Question: How easy was it to find information or get support from your insurer when you needed help?
Very easy
Somewhat easy
Somewhat difficult
Very difficult
When to follow up with "why?" Follow up with "why?" when you need to understand the reason behind a patient’s selection. For example, if a patient selects “Getting claims approved” as a challenge, following up with “Why was it difficult to get your claim approved?” helps uncover the root cause, giving you clearer, actionable insight.
When and why to add the "Other" choice? Always include an “Other” choice when you know patients might face unique issues that didn’t make your list. Often, it’s the “Other” responses—when paired with a follow-up (“Please describe what you meant by ‘Other’”)—that uncover the most surprising patterns or overlooked problems.
NPS question for patient surveys: Should you use it?
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) question asks: “How likely are you to recommend your health insurance provider to a friend or colleague?” Patients answer on a 0–10 scale, and you follow up based on their score. Using NPS in insurance coverage surveys makes sense because it benchmarks overall loyalty and satisfaction, especially when compared across time or groups. Considering that satisfaction with care varies significantly across insurance types—Medicare beneficiaries, for example, reported the highest satisfaction at 70.1% [3]—NPS helps pinpoint those at risk of switching or spreading negative reviews. Want to try it? See how fast you can build an NPS survey for patients about insurance coverage experience with Specific.
The power of follow-up questions
If you want to run world-class patient surveys, mastering follow-up questions is non-negotiable. Automated followups add context and clarity, and make your survey feel like a conversation instead of a cold form. Check out our deep-dive on automatic AI follow-up questions—it covers how they amplify your research without any extra effort.
Specific’s AI probes for details in real time, adjusting based on a patient’s last response—just like a skilled interviewer. Why does this matter? For one, people often skip details unless prompted. Automated followups save hours of chasing down incomplete responses afterward—no more endless back-and-forth via email or phone.
Patient: "I had trouble getting a medication covered."
AI follow-up: "Can you tell me more about what happened? Which medication, and what did your insurer say when you asked?"
How many followups to ask? In most cases, 2–3 well-targeted followups will get you the detail you need without making the exchange feel like an interrogation. With Specific, you can set the max number—or let the AI move on once it has enough context. This keeps surveys friendly, focused, and efficient.
This makes it a conversational survey: Smart followups transform a static list of questions into a dynamic conversation. The result? Patients open up, you get nuanced feedback, and people actually enjoy responding.
AI response analysis: Don’t worry about the flood of open-ended replies—AI-powered tools make it simple to analyze large volumes of text. Specific’s AI survey response analysis allows you to instantly summarize themes and dig into trends across your insurance survey results. Want to know more? See how to analyze responses from patient insurance surveys using AI.
Automated followup questions are a new approach—try generating a survey to see the experience firsthand.
How to write prompts for ChatGPT (or GPTs) to create great questions for insurance coverage experience surveys
You can use ChatGPT or similar AI to brainstorm survey questions quickly. Start by asking AI to suggest general open-ended questions:
Suggest 10 open-ended questions for Patient survey about Insurance Coverage Experience.
But the more context you provide about your needs, setting, and goals, the better your results. Try this upgraded prompt for richer output:
Our health organization serves a diverse population, with many patients expressing frustration around cost, transparency, and delayed claims. Suggest 10 open-ended survey questions to help us understand patient experiences with insurance coverage, focusing on barriers to accessing care and satisfaction with support.
Once you have a batch of questions, you can sort and organize them to strengthen your survey:
Look at the questions and categorize them. Output categories with the questions under them.
After reviewing categories (such as cost barriers, claim issues, transparency), go deeper on the most relevant topics like this:
Generate 10 questions for categories Cost Barriers and Claims Approval Process.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys flip the script—rather than ticking boxes, patients chat with an intelligent AI or chatbot that adapts with each response. This makes surveys more engaging and less intimidating, especially when discussing complex insurance barriers or emotional experiences. With Specific, these conversational surveys feel like texting with a helpful assistant instead of filling out a boring form.
So, how does this stack up against manual survey design? Here’s a side-by-side glance:
Manual Survey Creation | AI Survey Generator (like Specific) |
|---|---|
Time-consuming to write, edit, and tweak questions | Instantly generates tailored, expert questions from a prompt |
Static—can't adjust to respondent’s feedback in real time | Conversational—AI adapts followups for richer insight on the fly |
Analysis of open-ended responses is manual and slow | AI summarizes responses, finds trends, and reveals insights instantly |
Linear and impersonal experience | Smooth, personalized chat that works on any device |
Why use AI for patient surveys? AI survey tools don’t just speed up creation—they help you listen more deeply. With sentiment analysis at 95%+ accuracy and 60% faster feedback processing [10], you can find hidden dissatisfaction or surface unexpected success stories, all without the manual grind. Want to learn more? Check our step-by-step guide on how to create a patient insurance coverage survey using AI.
Specific delivers a best-in-class conversational survey experience—making feedback smoother for patients, and analysis simpler for you.
See this Insurance Coverage Experience survey example now
Create your own conversational insurance coverage experience survey and instantly unlock richer, more actionable feedback from patients. Specific’s AI delivers followup questions in real time and analyzes responses with expert-level depth—without any survey-building headaches. Don’t miss the chance to wow your stakeholders and get insights you can actually use.